Developmental Crises: Helping Leaders and Families Grow Through Defining Moments

Welcome to Legacy Builders, strategies for building successful family enterprises. Brought to you by Beacon Family Office at Assante Financial Management Limited. I’m your host, Cory Gagnon, Senior Wealth Advisor. And on this show, we explore global ideas, concepts, and models that help family enterprises better navigate the complexities of family wealth.

Today, we welcome Paul Edelman, who is an executive coach and advisor at Edelman and Associates who’s spent decades helping leaders and families navigate defining transitions and complex decisions. With a PhD in psychology from Harvard, he combines deep expertise with practical insight to guide clients through some of life’s most pivotal moments.

My goal is to be the most curious person in today’s conversation with Paul, as we explore how families and leaders grow through moments of uncertainty and positive disintegration. We’ll look at how thinking clearly, embracing discomfort, and honouring each person’s inner process can help build confidence, capacity, and connection across generations.

Now let’s dive in!

Cory: Welcome, Paul. We’re excited to have you here today to share your wealth of knowledge and experiences with us. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Paul: Terrific.

Cory: Imagine you’re delivering the commencement speech to the graduating class of 2025, and you have the chance to inspire them with your story. How would you begin your speech to convey the incredible lessons and expertise that you’ve gained along your career?

Paul: Well, Cory, let me say first, I’m not a big big fan of inspirational speeches, which commencement speeches often are. They typically bring in some luminary.  What I’ve found in my experience is that luminaries often get people excited or inspired. People may even adopt some of their language. But, if you look, sometime down the road, very little has changed. In my experience, real growth comes through lived experience, and through reflection, and through supportive conversations like those that might occur with a mentor or a coach, not through a single moment of inspiration.

Having said that, though, I think there’s a lot we can learn from Steve Jobs’ commencement speech, and I appreciate your sharing that with me in advance. His speech has three parts to it. He starts off by talking about the notion of connecting the dots. He gave the example of how he came up with a new typeface for computers, based on his experience during college, where he had taken a course in calligraphy. Then he talked about how he had gotten fired from Apple, and kind of wandered in the wilderness for a time before being invited back as CEO and being able to take the company to its current heights. And then thirdly, he talked about his poignant experience of having had cancer and, facing an early death in which he said, you should live each day as if it’s your last.

So when I thought about Steve Jobs’ speech, and what important lessons I’ve learned, and how I integrate those lessons in my work, few things came to me. One is integrating the concept of differentiation and integration. So when Steve talks about connecting the dots, he talks about it as if he’s doing this in hindsight, but this kind of happens in real time when we have experiences in our life, and we incorporate some of those experiences into our thinking. And as a result, we can develop new and better ways of looking at the world, and of solving problems and so on. And so that first story to me speaks to the importance of integration.

In the second case where he talked about getting fired, that experience reminded me there’s a psychologist named Dabrowski, and Dabrowski wrote about something he called positive disintegration. In other words, when things fall apart for you as they did for Steve Jobs when he got fired, it’s often accompanied by a lot of discomfort or unpleasant feelings. We may feel anxious or depressed, or go through a period of soul searching. It’s as if the preexisting integration that we have in our personality has been blown apart. But if we have the strength to work our way through it, as Steve Jobs did so well, we come back stronger. Dabrowski called this positive development in the personality through disintegration. But basically, the new integration represents a rebuilding at a higher level of development in a way we come back stronger from the experience.

And finally, the last piece of Jobs’ commencement speech where he talked about living each day as if it’s your last, I think the importance of that is that it reminds us to focus on what’s important to us. Some people call these values, but they are essentially a basis from which we determine the desired outcomes that we’re trying to accomplish, as well as the things we’re trying to avoid in our lives. And I think one of the purposes of our personality development is for us to become better, and better able to accomplish those things that are important to us. In other words, we’ve become more effective in our ability to solve problems, make decisions, and get what we want for ourselves and for others.

Cory: Wow. Paul, I love that. Now you used the word differentiation. And, you know what? I’ve been wanting to talk about this on a podcast episode for a while. I’ve done some research and some work of the importance as an individual and how this fits into family and the work that we do. So can you help people understand what that word means? And then maybe also, a little bit further into what integration means, because I think those are very key to our conversation here.

Paul: Yes. You know, people often talk about the notion of thinking clearly. They say, I wasn’t able to think clearly, or something got in the way of my ability to think clearly. And it kind of begs the question, what does it mean to think clearly? Well, our minds do at least two major things. It’s sort of like our cars. We can go in forward or reverse, but our minds can take things apart, break them into smaller pieces and look at those pieces, and then put things together. We can take those pieces and combine them, or recombine them in new ways.

So the taking apart is what I call differentiation. And the kinds of things that we can apply this mode of thinking to, it’s like when we’re going forward as opposed to going in reverse, we can differentiate our feelings. For example, somebody says I feel bad. Well, that’s not that well differentiated. But if somebody says, well, I’m feeling disappointed, unhappy, concerned, or something like that. That gives us a little bit more differentiated view of what they’re feeling. 

And likewise, if somebody’s trying to understand the situation, if they say, well, it’s a mess, that’s an undifferentiated term. But if they say, well, you know, we had three different groups of stakeholders, and they all had different goals, that’s a more differentiated picture. And you can break that down further and say, well, what were the goals of the different stakeholders? And then when we’re trying to solve a problem, we can come up with different options. If somebody says, well, we need a quick fix, that’s an undifferentiated notion of a solution. But if somebody says, well, I can imagine at least three different things we could do to make things better in the short term, that’s a more differentiated view.

Cory: Okay. And so the integration component is taking what it is that we’ve deconstructed and how it applies to the world around us and our world?

Paul: Well, integration involves putting things back together. It depends on the context what that might look like. But in the case of problem-solving, imagine a kind of generic scenario. The board of directors is facing a crisis, like COVID has knocked the company’s sales back by 50%. And a good leader will say, well, what are our options? And, a group may generate three options. Let’s call them a, b, and c. So a good leader then might say, well, what are the implications of each of these options? What are the pros and cons, the risks and benefits, or so on? That’s an active differentiation. 

So let’s say the group does that. They identify the pros and cons of a, b, and c. Now, a simple solution might be to say, well, we think “a” is the best. But what I would call an integrative solution or a generative solution is where the group says, well, wait a minute, what about d? What if we were to combine the best of a, b, and c, and minimize the worst of them? So that’s where the real breakthrough occurs. That’s the power of this process. But, you know, in freshman calculus, we learned that you have to differentiate before you can integrate. So in other words, you have to go through that process of identifying options a, b, and c, and considering the implications of each before you have the potential to come up with that integrative solution.

Now an alternative approach to this, which some board members take, which I find, much less likely to result in positive outcomes, is where they say, okay, so what should we do? And somebody says, well, we should do x. And this often results in what I would call an advocacy approach to decision-making, as opposed to what you might call selection from alternatives. And in this approach, there’s much less opportunity for differentiation and integration. So the person says, well, I think we should do x. And some people line up on the side of, yes. 

So I’m definitely pro x. And others, line up on the con side. No, not x. And not only does this not lead to the potential for the same kind of generative solutions in the earlier approach that I described, but also from a group dynamics point of view, there’s a tendency for people to line up on both sides and to see themselves both as more alike with those who are on the same side, and as more different or polarized against those who are on the other side. So it leads to what you might call “us versus them” thinking. And so you have the people on the pro side, looking down upon the people on the con side, and vice versa. So they also tend to resort to name-calling. 

The tendency is for the people on the pro side to call themselves the good guys. And the people on the con side get labeled as the bad guys and vice versa. And, so much of what people who work with families encounter is an expression of this dynamic.

Cory: And so, Paul, As you’re saying that, I think about politics and society these days. And not that we like to talk about politics on the show, but thinking about those outside influences and examples that are being given in society, how do families go about creating this better atmosphere that allows them to make better decisions collectively, and not get to that point of polarization?

Paul: Well, put your finger on something very important. Not only are there these processes of differentiation and integration, but it’s something that I call dedifferentiation, which is where you take something that’s been differentiated to a degree, and you reduce the amount of differentiation. You collapse it into a single view. For example, when somebody, let’s say one brother in a family, calls his brother a jerk. That represents a kind of dedifferentiation, because the brother is a complex human being who has positive qualities and negative qualities, beliefs that one might agree with, and beliefs that one might differ with, and so on. But to reduce all that into a single word, jerk, is to sort of do violence to all that differentiation. And from the point of view of effective problem-solving and decision-making, it’s not very useful or constructive. 

However, in the moment that one brother calls another brother a jerk, they experience what I would call transient euphoria. That is to say, it feels great for a second to reduce all that complexity into one word. And this is something that cult leaders understand very well. Because when somebody joins a cult, what they’re doing is they’re entering into a psychological bargain in which they give up a measure of autonomy in their own thinking and action in exchange for a reduction in anxiety or other unpleasant feelings. So the cult leader takes all the complexity of the world and reduces it to simple formulations, the good guys and the bad guys. You know, we’re going to get the bad guys, and we’re going to be the great good guys. And this happens in politics, and it happens in life, but it’s a response to the disruptive effects of unpleasant feelings.

When we are feeling badly in some way, it interferes with our ability to both differentiate and to integrate, to think in sort of forward, and to think in reverse. It’s like throwing sand in the gears of your car. And what we’d like to do, ideally, is to restore people’s capacity to think clearly, to be able to go in both of these directions more effectively. And the number one tool that we as advisors, coaches, or facilitators have at our disposal for doing this is empathy.

When somebody’s feeling badly and you approach them in a calm, well-reasoned way, and you make a statement perhaps that reflects back what they’re feeling, thinking, or considering doing in a way that resonates with them, oftentimes, you can observe them breathe a visible sigh of relief. And if we had some kind of brainwave monitor above their head and we were looking at that monitor, we would see the disruption. Let’s say it’s represented by a spike in unpleasant feeling. We would see that, or associated with that, their thinking. If we see a dip in their ability to think well, when we make an empathic statement or behave in an empathic way, we could almost imagine that tracing returning to its baseline level.

Cory: Right. And so, Paul, not that I, you know, I don’t want to get deep into therapeutic. But the idea of the positive disintegration, and you’ve talked about discomfort. And I love the idea of how we, as humans, become comfortable with discomfort. So how can families help the collective and each individual become okay with that level of discomfort that we don’t need to be protective or protected by that cult-like atmosphere, and we can be independent, face challenges, and rise above those. So how do we help families get those strengths and qualities and build that?

Paul: Well, there are different approaches to this at the individual level and at the group level. So if you’re talking to someone one-on-one, you might do things a little differently than if you’re talking to a group. But if you take, for example, the case of a group, I find it helpful to begin with a premise, which is that all of us are different in certain ways. 

We each have our own perspective, and everyone’s perspective is incomplete. So if you ask yourself, what are the implications of that for a group or for a family that wants to live together well, wants to thrive as a family? It implies that when you’re trying to solve problems or make a decision, all of the things being equal, the more useful information you have, the better. So it implies that, ideally, everyone’s position would be valued, and that we’re trying to make a decision. It affects everybody. We would try to involve everybody in that process, and we try to find out their perspective.

For example, there’s an approach to negotiation called interest-based negotiation. Basically, the idea is to find out what everybody wants, or wants to see happen. And the flip side of that is what each individual wants, so you go process of teasing out those things, and that lays the groundwork for coming up with some sort of solution, or making some kind of decision as a family that gets everybody as much of what they want as possible, realizing that nobody ever gets everything that they want. But that’s what you could call an integrative solution.

Cory: Right. And so, thinking back to Steve Jobs and that positive disintegration, that experience, the walking in the woods. Sometimes in families, and this might be a family council that’s saying, you know, that individual, there’s just something that they’re missing right now, where, maybe it’s a young individual, and they’re just looking lost. How do we create that atmosphere that allows them that positive development that you talked about where they can come back stronger? Is there a way that, and again, trying not to play God or anything, but to create maybe some sort of situation that allows them to have that experience and come back stronger?

Paul: Well, one of the most important things to recognize in this context is that the individual who appears lost may be experiencing what Dabrowski would have called a positive disintegration. So, in other words, Dabrowski had a term he called primitive integration. We start out in life taking in things from the outside. We take in lessons we learned from our parents. We take in attitudes, ways of thinking, ways of looking at the world, beliefs, and so on.  And it’s all kind of external, and we don’t necessarily question it. And to a degree, we comply with those things. Certainly, our parents are powerful figures in our lives. 

They determine whether we get fed and protected or not, and so we have a lot of reason to take in what’s coming from them. But this represents a kind of primitive level of integration. At some point, we may experience a kind of developmental crisis, or a developmental moment, where we’ve begun to question everything that we’ve taken in from the outside. And this is not necessarily pathological. This is an important thing, that this falling apart can proceed great leaps forward in growth, just as it did for Jobs when he got fired.

So if we take a positive view of the young person who appears to be in a funk, it may be that they’re just questioning everything that’s been given to them up to this point, and what they’re doing is sort of taking a closer look at things. And this may be uncomfortable. It may be associated with anxiety, depression, and other unpleasant feelings. But they’re taking a closer look. They’re struggling with things. They’re ideally differentiating their thinking. You know, they’re thinking about what’s really important to me. Like, if I made a list of the top five things that are most important to me, that’s an active differentiation. 

So then the integration comes when they say, well, how can I live my life in a way that brings me more of these things? So through this process, they may arrive at a higher level of integration, a kind of reintegration that advances their development. So if we take this perspective on things, we can look at this young person who appears to be in a funk, or wants to take a year off or whatever, much more positively, if we can reframe this as a developmental opportunity or sign as a positive shift is brewing, I think it makes it a lot easier for us as parents or family leaders.

Cory: Many families have come up with creative ways to help that individual through that year. And I think, great to think about, what does that gap year look like, and go travel, and whatnot. But thinking about it, and maybe you have a great example of this, but really more, what is that journey? What are we looking to create through that journey, to get to that desired outcome? Like in creating that experience and helping that person, what can family members be thinking about in what they’re suggesting to that person who’s in the funk?

Paul: Well, the earlier phase, this is where I was calling, or Dabrowski would call the primitive integration, I described as taking in from the outside. It’s more outer-directed. But the new phase, the higher level of development, ideally, will be more from the inside or inner-directed. And so the very notion of giving advice to the young person runs counter to that notion of helping them to become more inner-directed.

I was in a session at the PPI conference recently, where we were talking about how to help young people to develop decision-making confidence. And we’re talking about the notion of working inside the business, or working outside the business for some years. And one experienced adviser said, well, I tell the young people that they ought to work outside the business. And I asked a question. I said, well, how is telling them to work outside the business different from telling them to work inside the business? And afterwards, I went up to her and asked her if I’d been too hard on her, and she said, no. I wrote that down. It was really helpful. But the point is that telling others what to do is not what’s needed when they’re trying to become more interactive. It’s much more helpful to ask questions that both help them to think in a more differentiated way and to further their integration.

So here’s what I mean by a differentiating question. Somebody says, well, I really want to do what I think is important to me and say, well, important in what way? Or, what are the things that are important to you? And then after you’ve led them through that kind of conversation, you could ask what I call an integrating question. You say, okay, so you’ve articulated five different things that are important to you, and you talked about even the order in which you prioritize them. How do you see these things fitting together? Or, what would a career look like that incorporated these elements? This is the essence of coaching, what good coaches do. And I differentiate this from coaches who enjoy telling other people what to do, because that’s a whole different brand. But the idea is to avoid imposing your way of thinking or your will on someone, and rather giving them the space, the room, to go through this process for themselves.

Cory: Right. And, Paul, thinking about families of wealth, typically, they just think that money can solve all problems. And so in that context, how do we ensure that we’re not just pouring gas on the fire?

Paul: So the notion that money can solve all problems is what I would call an undifferentiated view. So the coaching question would be, in what way might it be useful? I mean, money could certainly pay for good coaching, or it could pay for a gap year, or it can relieve some of the financial pressure that causes people to experience what you might call premature career foreclosure. The person who goes to work as a day laborer because that’s the only work they can find, and they get stuck in that job for the rest of their life. Money can help avoid a lot of these things. But if money pays for hot and cold running advisors, who tell everybody what to do, or provide answers to all the questions, or solutions to all the problems, then it can deprive people of the opportunity to go through this process described for themselves.

Because every time you go through the process of first breaking down a problem and then coming up with some sort of generative solution, you develop confidence in your own ability to do that. Each repeated cycle of success in that, leads to more and more confidence. Confidence, by the way, shouldn’t be confused with an absence of unpleasant feelings. Somebody who’s really confident doesn’t mean they don’t feel nervous before they’re going out to make a speech, let’s say. But they’ve done it enough times to know that in spite of those unpleasant feelings, they can do a good job if they follow a process of breaking it down into “how do I need to prepare for this,” and putting it back together and saying, okay, what would my finished presentation look like?

Cory: Right. And so in building that confidence, and there’s a lot of capacity to be able to live within the very complex world that we live in, what is it that we can do to support each other? You spoke of those uncomfortable moments. How do we help people in that small amount of confidence just to get to that next level?

So what I was getting at, Paul, is more of that self-sufficiency. What are those little steps that we can do to build that confidence to become confident in our own ability, and that we have those capacities to, or have the capacity to be able to accomplish more and fight bigger, more uncomfortable situations?

Paul: So in order to build confidence, having other people around to tell you the right answer all the time certainly mitigates against the development of confidence. Another thing that mitigates against the development of confidence is the fear of failure. And this is one way that wealth can work against people, because in wealthy families, there’s often a tendency, and sometimes this tendency is fostered by advisors, well-meaning advisors who say, you know, tell the family stories, perpetuate the legacy. But this can lead to a view of the wealth creators as larger-than-life figures. And what often gets lost in that is the notion that these are people who’ve made lots of mistakes, and who’ve learned from those mistakes. 

So I think it’s very important not to get lost in the story, not to overidealize the founding generation or generations, and not to imply that they did everything right, but rather to teach people that wisdom comes through experience. And the important part of experience is the opportunity to make mistakes and then reflect on what went wrong, and think about what might be done differently for things to go better the next time.

Cory: And, Paul, in this world that we live in, where social media is that highlight reel of everything is great and look how amazing my life is, I think that all families are dealing with this, where our current generation is the most anxious generation yet, because of what we’re doing with devices. And so I love that idea of not sugarcoating the story, and actually helping people understand, here are my struggles and here’s what I’ve overcome. And so, in that absence of, you know, I don’t want to tell people here’s how you do it, but how do we convey those lessons and help people see, I’m not some godlike person who created this, and now you cast the shadow over all future generations?

Paul: Well, I think we have to model that in our behavior. I gave a talk the other day, and I had a collaborator. And my collaborator came up to me at the end. We shook hands and patted each other on the back because we felt good about how it had gone. And he said to me, Paul, you are so smart. And I said to him, well, that’s because I’ve been at it for a long time. I’ve had an opportunity to make a lot of mistakes and learn from them. We’re all born the same way. Maybe there’s genetics, but most of it is just that experience along the way.

In my own case, here’s a confession, I suppose. I have institutionalized this process, and I’ve been following it for forty years, because I have worked more or less continuously with two professional mentors, one who died maybe ten or so years ago. And at that point, I kind of shifted to working exclusively with another one whom I had worked with, had known for forty years, but my focus kind of shifted from one to the other. But both were terrific figures in the other. 

The second one continues to be, and in my life. And what I do is I talk about the work that I’m doing and the difficulties that I encounter, and they provide me with an opportunity to reflect on it. And they ask me simple questions like, what were you trying to do, and how did it work out, and what do you think was missing, or what do you think was present that got in the way, and what would you do differently next time? And those are the same questions that I ask in my coaching work.

Cory: Absolutely! And as you said, call it values or whatever it is. It’s really what is it you’re trying to accomplish there? And what’s getting in the way? What’s working? What’s not working?

Now, Paul, as we near the end of our conversation today, there are a few questions that I ask each guest before we wrap up. Are you ready for the tough ones?

Paul: Sure!

Cory: We might have already covered this, but I think it’s a great opportunity for us to maybe highlight or add a little bit more context. So what is one key strategy you believe is most essential for building a successful family enterprise?

Paul: I would say to build a culture of thoughtful decision-making, and in the process, to foster clear thinking, where clear thinking is defined the way we talked about earlier. So families can practice slowing down and listening, and then deciding together, coming up with what we call integrative solutions earlier. And this creates trust and confidence, which are needed to thrive across generations.

Cory: And, Paul, I didn’t ask this earlier, but in your example of the chairman of a board, where would somebody get those skills to be able to lead a group successfully that way?

Paul: Well, it takes opportunities for practice. One of the challenges that young people growing up in wealthy families face is that so many things are done for them that they may be deprived of these kinds of opportunities. But families can be thoughtful about figuring out ways to create challenges for young people to face and tackle, either individually or together in small groups. It could be something like giving them a pool of dollars to invest in philanthropy, or to invest in startup companies, or whatever. But it’s these low-risk situations where it’s okay to make mistakes and learn from them that I think are most helpful in building those skills.

Cory: Fantastic! And what is the most common challenge that you see family enterprises encountering when it comes to wealth transition and generational continuity?

Paul: Well, this is what we talked about, you might call it the deprivation of wealth, where people are deprived of the opportunity to practice, deprived of the opportunity to make decisions for themselves, deprived of the opportunity to think it’s okay to make a mistake. So I think that tends to undermine confidence. So you see the 40-year-old rising gen that hasn’t found their way in the world yet, hasn’t had the opportunity to make decisions for themselves, or to experience that breaking down and rebuilding thing that Steve Jobs described going through.

Cory: Right. And in your experience, what are the top three key qualities that successful family enterprise leaders possess?

Paul: I would say that the best leaders are self-aware. They’re curious, and they’re steady under pressure. They can continue to function, continue to think clearly, even in the presence of unpleasant feelings that may come up in difficult circumstances. And that’s the kind of confidence that’s built. It’s not that they’re free of those unpleasant feelings. It’s just that through the repeated experience of successfully dealing with them, they’ve come to trust that they can handle it, and they can meet a group through it.

Cory: Right! And again, another example of they might have those same feelings that somebody who feels like they’re facing that for the first time, it’s not abnormal, and kind of like the duck floating in the water. There’s a lot going on under the surface. And so I love that you bring that up, Paul.

Paul: And I guess, part of modeling is to acknowledge that they feel those unpleasant feelings. During COVID, I think a good leader would say something like, this is terrible. Now, how are we all going to manage best to find our way through this, as opposed to trying to make out that it’s not a big deal or whatever. You know, kind of false bravado.

Cory: Right, absolutely! And before we conclude our discussion, I’d like to highlight where our listeners can engage in more conversations, such as the one we had, and maybe resources that would allow them to continue down this road. Maybe some of those conversations that you’re having.  Also, please plug where our guests can find you as well, Paul.

Paul:  Well, thanks for that opportunity. I discussed some of these kinds of things in my LinkedIn profile, and through postings, I try to create dialogue among people. I’ll ask questions sometimes at the beginning and often at the end of each post, and I try to get people thinking and sharing with each other.

There are different organizations for advisers, like the Purposeful Planning Institute or the Ultra High Net Worth Institute, where we come together and share this kind of thinking. And for families, there are various organizations like Fox and others where families come together to share in a safe, confidential environment with each other. And I think for young people, there are a lot of peer learning and support groups. I run one myself, and there are other people who do a good job of running these kinds of groups where people can come together with others who share their experiences and learn from each other, and talk about not just what’s going great, the kinds of things they might post on Instagram, but also the challenges that they face.

Cory: Absolutely! Peer networks are fantastic for that collective and individual growth. And, Paul, I wanted to make sure that we covered everything today. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with our audience that maybe we didn’t get a chance to touch on?

Paul: Well, there’s so much more that could be said. I guess I would encourage people, if the way I think resonates with them, to take a look at some of the things on my website. I’ve created an article on how to build decision-making confidence recently, which I think people might find interesting, and there are other resources there as well.

Cory: Fantastic! We’ll make sure to grab links to those and post them in the show notes, along with the other resources that you mentioned, Paul. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your expertise, your experiences, those stories with us today. Your insights have been incredibly valuable to me on my journey, and I know that our audience will be grateful for your contribution as well, Paul.

Paul: Thanks, Cory. I enjoyed the conversation!

As we wrap up this episode, we invite you to reflect on the conversation we’ve shared with Paul about the defining moments that shape us. Often, growth begins when life feels uncertain.

Whether you’re part of a family enterprise or work alongside one, Paul’s insights offer a framework for turning discomfort into development. His perspective challenges the instinct to rescue or resolve too quickly and instead encourages us to make space for growth even when things appear to be falling apart.

Throughout our discussion, Paul highlighted how clear thinking begins with differentiation, breaking down what we’re feeling, seeing, or deciding, and how integration allows us to bring those parts back together in meaningful ways. We explored how families can navigate polarization, avoid oversimplified narratives, and support rising-generation growth through empathy and trust in the process. By embracing discomfort and recognizing positive disintegration as part of development, families can build the confidence and capacity to lead with greater clarity across generations.

For families seeking expertise in family enterprise advising and developmental coaching,  Paul Edelman is ready to help. We’ve included his contact information and additional resources in the show notes to support you on your journey.

Disclaimer: 

This program was prepared by Cory Gagnon, who is a Senior Wealth Advisor with Beacon Family Office at Assante Financial Management Ltd. This not an official program how Assante Financial Management and the statements and opinions expressed during this podcast are not necessarily those how Assante Financial Management. This show is intended for general information only and may not apply to all listeners or investors; please obtain professional financial advice or contact us at BeaconFamilyOffice@Assante.com or visit BeaconFamilyOffice.com to discuss your particular circumstances before acting on the information presented.